Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a American physicist.
After studying at M.I.T. and Princeton University, he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
Feynman's major contribution was to quantum electrodynamics. He introduced the diagrams, now called Feynman diagrams, which are used to describe the behaviour of systems of interacting particles. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965.
He had a leading role in the investigation of the crash of the space shuttle Challenger.
Feynman liked to tell a story about how when he was a little kid, he asked his father, "Why do things fall?" As an adult, he praised his father for answering, "Nobody knows why things fall. It's a deep mystery, and the smartest people in the world don't know the basic reason for it." Contrast that with the average person's off-the-cuff answer, "Oh, it's because of gravity." Feynman liked his father's answer, because his father realized that simply giving a name to something didn't mean that you understood it. [1]